A recording and a-muse-ment of my virtual trials and travails in the metaverse.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

In Which I Try To Help Someone

Last night, after several days of vomiting asset servers and assorted technological spastic-colon problems in SL, I saw a panicked message in a Group tab:

Username: "Help! I have been trying to save a Notecard for an hour and it won't save!"

After going through numerous troubleshooting strategies with several other Users like "did you try to include no-perm LMs or pictures; did you try cut and pasting from outside SL, did you try deleting that notecard and making another, etc" and having no success, I said:

Miso Susanowa: "Here, let me Google that for you (LMGTFY)"

GOOGLE SEARCH FIELD: "error messages" +"second life"

RESULTS: 500,000

Of course, I instantly disregarded the first results, as they included things like:

"You may experience error messages while using Second Life. This is not unusual. It means that for whatever reason, Borkage Linden, aka The Swedish Linden, has temporarily taken over SL. The error messages may vary, but all indicate that Borkage Linden is in control for the duration.

If you receive one of these error messages, and attempts to fix or address this problem by other residents fail and they explain that it is due to Borkage, you have one option:

To run around and around in circles shouting, 'BORKBORKBORKBORK!" until you tire or until it makes you laugh, whichever. Go read a book or take a bubble bath."

Needless to say, this sage advice was resisted by Username, who insisted that there must be a logical explanation or that they, and we, must just be too stupid to understand how to save a simple text-only notecard. I tried to explain that Teh Boyz had borrowed this "you have teh dumb" strategy from Microsoft, who have used it quite successfully to explain their own Borkage of many years, but alas; this Username was unsatisfied.

Ohhh not at all, Apmel! The Swedish Chef has an honored history on the innertubez, and graciously lends his name and pithy wisdom to problems which seem, at first glance, insoluble, but when viewed through a highly-developed common-sense filter, which I can only assume has been honed and polished by those most sensible people, the Swedes, reveal themselves to be nothing more than vaporspeak, thus deserving the Chef's ultimate judgement of "borkborkbork!"

Now, if I was to impugne the Swedes in any way, I might have said, "bjork!bjork!bjork!" but I did not, out of a sense of admiration.

If I really wanted to get nasty, I would have said, "celinedioncelinedioncelinedion!" but I have respect for my Canadian friends and did not with to cause them further embarrassment.

Ahhhh Brenda, yes; it is difficult to tell these secret factions apart, but I will try to Illuminate you:

FIC - Feted Inner Core - Kinda like the Illuminati or the Vatican Assassin Warlocks; a conspiracy theory put forth by P. Neva modeled on the Elders of Zion; responsible for everything that goes wrong for P. Neva.

FOC - no, not the Front Obrer de Catalunya but the Fetid Outer Core, invented by Mr. Hamster Au to explain why Residents of Second Life keep bringing up embarrassing things like crapping asset servers, inability to hold a Group Chat beyond 3 minutes without it crapping and Crap Mariner instead of drooling and playing with the new shiny and being good little girls and boys and admitting that Second Life is dead, dead, dead, which doesn't really make sense if you want someone to play with the new shiny. But there it is.

FOC² - Fantastic Outer Core - A reactionary grassroots movement sweeping the digital frontier, led by gardeners, wizards and pixies in response to the pronouncements of the Cheerleading Upper Crusty Kids Of Outerville (C.U.C.K.O.O.s)